Category: Religion
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Plantinga Reviews Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism
Here. The wild diversity of religious doctrines suggests to Kitcher that they are all almost certainly false. Plantinga makes an interesting response: But even for whole systems: there is certainly wide variety here, but how does it follow that they are all almost certainly false? Or even that any particular one is almost false? Kitcher's…
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Levels of Reality and the Essence of Religion
Reading John Anderson has enhanced my sense of the centrality of the question of levels of reality for those of us who view philosophy as a quest for the Absolute and a project of self-transformation. Of course it was more or less obvious to me all along, Plato's Allegory of the Cave being the richest…
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Must an Atheist Eschew Religious Practice?
David Benatar of anti-natalist fame argues in the negative. (HT: London Karl)
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Can a Theist Maintain that Some Lack a Religious Disposition?
Suppose you believe that man has been created in the image and likeness of God. Can you, consistently with that belief, hold that only some possess a religious disposition? I often say things like the following: The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix)…
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Buber Contra Buddhism
The following quotations are from Martin Buber's I and Thou (tr. Walter Kaufmann, Scribner's, 1970, pp. 140-141): Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All…
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A Good Article on the Meaning of ‘Secular’
Here. HT: Tom Coleman.
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Lichtenberg on Religion and Stoicism
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 112, Notebook G, Aph. #24: To make man as religion wants him to be resembles the undertaking of the Stoics: it is only another grade of the impossible. I agree completely with Herr Lichtenberg that the Stoic ideal is…
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Jack Kerouac: A Buddhist Wanderer Comes Home
Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 45 years ago today, securing his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish: The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. …
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Accepts the Apostles’ Creed, Balks at the Athanasian Creed: Second-Class Christian?
The following from a reader: I have been accused, on a forum, of being a second-class Christian because I have stated that I cannot understand Trinitarian doctrine [as presented in the Athanasian creed]. I have stated that I do accept the Apostles' Creed, but that is not seemingly good enough. So I have asked for…
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The Complacency of Unbelief
Doubt is to be deployed against the complacency of unbelief as much as against the complacency of belief. A vital faith is never entirely free of purifying doubt which in some persons, at some times, extends to the brink of despair. Christ on the cross experienced the deepest depth of Incarnation in the feeling of…
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Sam Harris on the Very Idea of Divine Revelation as ‘Poison’
Sam Harris is a liberal I respect and admire. He has not succumbed to the PeeCee delusion and he actively combats it. Although Harris is a contemporary, he is not a 'contemporary liberal' as I use that phrase: he is a classical or old-time or paleo or respectable liberal. But on religion and some philosophical…
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Is Catholicism a Religion?
Is the pope Catholic? I would like to believe that James V. Schall, S. J. has a better understanding of Catholicism than I do, but I just now read the following from his otherwise very good On Revelation: Catholicism is a revelation, not a religion. The word “religion” refers to a virtue by which we…
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Not Enough Evidence?
"Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!" (Bertrand Russell) It may well be that our predicament is such as to disallow conclusive or even sufficient evidence of the truth about it. If Plato's Cave Allegory is apt, if it lays bare the truth of the human predicament, then it must be that the evidence that…
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Islam as a Gang Religion
William Kilpatrick, The Gender Confusion Challenge to Army Recruitment. Excerpt: As usual, the mainstream media is all wrong about Islam. In FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield points out that “looting was the core of Muhammad’s conquests.” And it came with Allah’s seal of approval. Numerous passages in the Koran and in the biography of Muhammad attest…
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D. M. Armstrong on Religion
(Photo credit: David Chalmers via Andrew Chrucky) I posted on Armstrong's naturalism yesterday, and that got me to thinking whether he ever said anything anywhere about religion. A little searching turned up the following 2002 interview of Armstrong by Andrew Chrucky. Here is an excerpt that touches upon Armstrong's view of religion: Chrucky: Let me…